Part One: Ragnar Redbeard: The Patron Saint of Toxic Masculinity

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What strong my outs. I'm Robert Evans hosted Behind the Vastards.
I was up too late last night ingesting narcotics and
today is gonna be a ship show. Thankfully. To help
me get through it, I have my co host Jamie lofta,
what's going on you Tube? Literally it was just you

(00:23):
just got home and you just started doing with it.
You know, you know what I did last night? I
did well, we can edit out if you don't want
to get specific, but we can just bleep the drug
of choice, which would honestly make it sound way cooler
than what you actually did. Let's let's let's leave plausible
deniability that it might have been legal. Yeah, so so

(00:46):
I did something that was legal but very sad. I
did that thing where you get this the little, the
little four pack of tiny Sutter homes were on sale.
Oh that's that is deeply sad, James. And then I
drank go for It's sad. It's sad to drink. It
comes out to like two thirds of a bottle of wine,

(01:06):
which is actually, now that I'm saying it out loud,
also sad. But drinking four tiny bottles is it's tough.
It's tough. What what's sad is that when you're in
that space, you want wine, but you don't have your
ship together enough to open a bottle to like pull
a cork out. Like that's when you drink those Sutter
Home bottles a little, their twist tops, and they were

(01:28):
they were heavily discounted at my CV as God knows why.
Maybe there was tape on them. I don't know. I
think of them like the mood that you are in
when you drink that is like I have the wherewithal
I have no Like the most that I can handle
right now is opening a soda, but I want it
to be wine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just I

(01:51):
don't know I got I'm gonna cut myself slack on it.
I'm not gonna do any self searching about why I
drank the four tiny wines I had. I was fine.
I had a fine day. I don't have I don't
have a problem right now. No. You see this ties
actually into the theme of the episode, Jamie. This is
Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about the
worst people in all of history, and a lot of

(02:11):
the worst people in all of history spend way too
much time analyzing themselves rather than just not thinking about
things too hard. And that is where we get terrible,
terrible people like the person we're talking about today. Love it? Yeah?
Who pulled it out? In the end? Who is it?
No one and no one ever tells me anything anymore.

(02:32):
I I asked to know, and then I was handily rejected. Well,
you will not know this person by their name. Have
you ever heard of Arthur Desmond? No? He sounds like
good sexy cartoon prints. He is not Google images. Have
you heard of Ragnar Redbeard? Yes? Why have I heard

(02:53):
of that? Is that a metal band? Robert Well? Actually, yes,
but that's not what it is originally. Um. You you
remember the Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooting? Yes? I do, well. Yeah.
On July nineteen, Santino Lgan cut a hole in the
fence surrounding that festival, snuck inside and started shooting at
people with an a R fifteen. He killed three, he

(03:14):
wounded seventeen. His youngest victim was six years old. Uh.
And of course, as we always do now after a
mass shooting, a bunch of researchers and law enforcement started
like going through that guy's online presence to try to
figure out all right, what was this one? Was this
guy like a white nationalist? Was the nicest guy? Was
this just like just a dude shooting people for no reason?

(03:34):
And we found an Instagram post that the shooter had
made a couple of days before the shooting, and he
attached an image of like Smokey the Bear with a
sign that said fire danger high today. And then he
posted read might is right by Ragnar red Beard? Why
over crowded towns and pay more open space to make
room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?

(03:57):
What was his post? So? My is Right is a
very famous book. It's not the most prominent piece of
white nationalist literature, but it's up there. Uh. And the
guy who wrote it used a pseudonym because no one
has ever been named Ragnar Redbeard Like Vikings would have
been like, dude, that's that's a little bit much, huh,

(04:18):
Like yeah, a little little silly, it's a bit over
the tight does sound like a like a steam punky
kind of like a D and D kind of name.
I I really One of the untold stories of history
is how many mass shootings Dungeons and Dragons has helped
us to avoid by giving people with too much imagination
and outlet rather than somewhere to go. Yeah, not mass shootings,

(04:39):
but like shitty books. I I shouldn't say mash it's
it's it's it's stopped a lot of shitty books from happening,
because the tale of Arthur Desmond is the tale of
a guy who if he'd gotten together with friends and
been able to play Barbarian for like four hours every
Sunday Bari, he wouldn't have written this book. It's it's
a class and dungeons and dragons. Oh, okay, okay, okay,

(05:00):
christ Jamie, Okay, Sorry, King, just getting screamed at by
a man in a kimono not paid to be here, Robert,
you're just screaming. I mean a kimono. I do like
the kimono. I like the past. Thank you, thank you,
thank you. This kimono is I don't know. I don't

(05:22):
know this one had this coming into this The last
time I was here, it was it was we were
just still at the Then what is the big hooked knife,
the fluffy machet, the machete. I have a lot of
machete at where does the kimon what happened, Like, what's
the story with the kimono? Oh, much of my parents

(05:42):
lived in Japan for most of their lives, are a
huge chunk of their lives, and so I would get
kimonos as gifts on a regular basis. And they're comfortable. Okay,
well I like that. Yeah, yeah, they're nice. It's a
nice thing to put on when you're hungover in the
morning and you have to do your podcast with your
good friend Jamie Loftus. I can't say it enough. It
is not the morning, it is not. It is well

(06:04):
after two, but I have been up for less than
a half hour. That's true. It was fun to watch
in real time. Yeah. Yeah, if if my ship is
not together, like when i'm when it's not together, I
start comparing people who play Dungeons and Dragons to mass shooters,
which is wildly unfair and not the point I was

(06:24):
trying to make. Um But but and yet we had
to cancel you, and yeah this is how I get
Oh please cancel me. Oh my god, I could go
back to sleep. Yeah, okay, okay, great, there is I
forget who too. I don't know who tweeted this, but
there was a tweet that was like, I hope when
I get canceled, I'm surrounded by my closest family and friends,

(06:47):
and as I feel the same way, we'll all be
canceled one day and then we will go to the
happy hunting grounds, uh, where we can all get on
open mics and shout racial slurs, which is uh, like, like,
what was that guy SEINFELDT It's it's Seinfeld Heaven? What

(07:09):
the guy Jerry Seinfeld? No, No, no, Kramer, Oh, Michael
rich that's the joke. I was Michael Richard's heaven? Would
just mean? I thought you were like, I want to
Jerry Seinfeld slurs. I'm like, why would you want that? Wrong?
It's this one poorly constructed joke after another. Um, you're
waking up. I can see you're drinking coffee. You can

(07:31):
see the pieces of the joke everything. I can see
the ingredients, and but you just threw him in the bowl.
That's actually how I cooked breakfast, just oats without water,
drinking coffee so nasty. I had the breakfast place I

(07:53):
go to. Um, they finally told me that they think
what I do to my breakfast is gross. What do
you do to your breakfast? I get a bagel with
cream cheese and a tomato on top, and then I
put so much salt on top of the tomato and
the bagel, and then I dipped the whole thing in
five packets of catchup. Now you see, Jamie, I was
actually going, like I was planning before you gave that out,

(08:15):
to like make fun of you for whatever it was
you were doing, because like you said the precedent that
that was okay, but that does sound good. They were like,
it's too much catch up, it's too much salt. You're
gonna die. And I hope I do. We all will. Yeah,
hopefully we get canceled first so we have some time
to sleep and we really have a time to panic. Yeah,
it's time to talk about a man who was never
canceled and definitely should have been Arthur Desmond, who was

(08:39):
almost certainly yeah yeah, yeah, So this this guy Ragnar
Redbeard who wrote this book Might is right. Obviously it
was a pseudonym, and we don't a hundred percent no
who wrote Might is right, but we're about sure it
was Arthur Desmond. There are some people who will say
it was Jack London, but he would have been like
a teenager when the book came out. Um, and also
Jack London was not that racist. Um, pretty racist, yeah,

(09:03):
but not that racist. So Arthur Desmond, in addition to
being Ragnar red Beard, is probably or because he's Ragnar
red Beard, is widely considered to be the most internationally
influential political thinker in New Zealand's history. Now, there are
only about fourteen people in New Zealand, so this is
an easier, like, if you're gonna pick a country to

(09:24):
be the most influential international political thinker from, it's one
of the easier ones. But unfortunately for New Zealand, he
was a gigantic piece of shit. Um yeah, bad guy.
This is actually I'm excited to talk about this one
with you because this is a guy who's more complicated

(09:45):
than you'd expect from a dude who wrote a book
called Mike Is Right and used the name Ragnar red Beard.
He actually started out kind of awesome. Um, so this
is like a this is like a fucking Godfather like
story of like a dude who seemed like he was
kind of on a pretty great path, uh and then
basically became a Nazi. So it's I mean, it's a

(10:07):
it's a common thread there's it's relatable for many people
in the country. Yeah yeah, yeah, well unfortunately, yes about
um now, uh okay, we don't know precisely when Arthur
Desmond was born or exactly where, nor do we know

(10:28):
anything about his parents. Uh. Mark Derby, who's a historian
who wrote a book about Arthur, said in an interview,
I'm not certain that Arthur Desmond is his real given name.
It probably isn't. If you dig into this guy as
much as possible using the internet, you'll run into speculation.
He was probably born around eighteen forty two, certainly in
the early eighteen forties. He was of English and Irish descent,

(10:50):
and he probably grew up somewhere around Hawks Bay in
New Zealand. And that's Hawks Hawks with an e. It's
a cool name. Now he had in New Zealand, he
had a New Zealand accent. Oh yeah, for sure. This's
going to inform my my opinion of him. Just imagine
the guy, like, just pick a random cast member from

(11:12):
what we do in the Shadows and assume that's how
this guy sounded. Whichever one you want, Okay, So it's Brett, Okay,
good choice? Got um? Now one side I found makes
the claim that Arthur Desmond's quote background and date of
birth has never been confirmed because throughout his life he
made a point of covering his tracks, which is always
a sign that somebody was up to a lot of good. Now,

(11:37):
whatever the reality of his mysterious origins, eight four is
the year in which Arthur Desmond first emerges solidly into
the historical record. Uh he was, you know, somewhere between
like twenty and forty when he stepped forward to declare
his candidacy for parliament. The editor of The Hawks, Bay Harold, wrote, quote,
we only know that Mr Desmond is a cattle drover

(11:58):
and that he is of radical tendency. Desmond ran, yeah, yeah,
he's a political radical um in a way that's good
for the time. He ran as a representative of the
small settler and the working man um and he convinced
about in a hundred and ninety people to vote for
his platform, which was mainly based around what he called
a single tax. This was a very revolutionary plan to

(12:19):
eliminate all taxes within the colony and replaced them with
a single tax on landownership. So he's anti aristocracy, anti elite.
He just wants the rich people to deal with the
burden of taxes to like free up the common man
and the laboring classes and whatnot, which seems Yeah, I
mean it pretty progressive for for the air, pretty progressive
for this he's on. He's on a good track. Yeah,

(12:40):
he's on a good track now between try I'm stuck
on between twenty and forty. Yeah, I don't know. Some
some sources say that he was like born in eighteen
forty two, and you know, the eighteen eighties is when
he got started into politics. But other sources say he
was like twenty five when he got started into politics.
I really have no idea. Again, we don't know when
this sucker was born. You know, it was also the

(13:02):
mid eighteen hundreds, nobody kept records. People just like dropped
babies into fields and then off you went. We should
just start describing herselves this way. But we're like, yeah,
sometime but between ages twenty and forty. I would love
that to be on my driver's license, yeah, exactly, Yeah,
between twenty and fifty, Yeah, somewhere in there. So, yeah,

(13:24):
he was. He was a radical politician. You would call
him like a radical left wing pro labor guy. I'm
gonna quote now from one of his speeches during this period,
where he's talking about sort of the working classes in
their plight. I have seen men living in a hut
where no fire was allowed, going to bed on a wet,
cold day to keep themselves warm. I have seen the
wind in the rain coming in through the cracked roof,
and the winter storm whistling through the rafters as it

(13:46):
does through the rigging of a ship. And I have
also known of the owners of these colonial farms gallivanting
in some London ballroom upon the profits of these slaves labor.
So pretty pretty well guy, you know, it seems fine.
He was also so an outspoken defender of Maori rights
to their own ancestral lands. Yeah, he was anti white

(14:07):
people stealing native land. Um, so that's cool. What's the
twist with this motherfucker? It's less of a twist and
more of like a gradual turn that eventually leads to
him going into complete opposite direction. Um, but it's it's yeah, well,
we'll see if we can pinpoint where this happens. So

(14:28):
you know, obviously, uh, this guy's a left winger. The
press at the time instantly started mocking him and his
wild beliefs about landowners paying taxes and indigenous people existing.
Arthur wrote back to his detractors, and he accused the
entire elected government of New Zealand of being a pack
of thebes. He was promptly banned from being published in
the Hawk's Bay Weekly Courier. Three yeah, three years yeah yeah,

(14:50):
he was like writing writing fiery letters to the editor. Now.
Three years later, in eighties seven, Desmond ran for parliament again.
He claimed that his radical politics had prompted the land
and owners he relied on for work to blacklist him.
Unable to find work, he had to travel far from
home in order to get hired by people who hadn't
heard of him. In spite of this, Desmond doubled down
on his stances, excoriating landlords, bankers, monopolists and capitalists in

(15:13):
general in his speeches. He also introduced a new policy. Now,
rather than just taxing landholders, he also wanted to nationalize
all large estates and effectively take land away from the
very wealthy. He was yeah, it's pretty cool, I mean
by my opinion here. He was more successful in this
campaign and actually obtained a majority of the votes in Taradale,

(15:34):
which was the second largest town in the district. Many
Kiwi's cheered when he called banked directors scoundrels and landlords
blood sucking leeches, and the press that yeah, yeah, yeah, right,
you're on board with other Desmond so far. When the
press attacked his radical politics, he called them higher lings
of monopoly, which was almost certainly fair. Good band, you

(15:54):
higher things of monopoly. Yeah, that's like a ska band
that advises people to pay their rent. Yeah, dad's got
rent on time. There's somehow always headlining in New Hampshire. Yeah.
Despite his substantial progress, Arthur Desmond still lost the election
by some four votes. Now, a more patient Bernie Sanders

(16:17):
like radical might have kept on building his base of support.
After all, he'd tripled his number of voters between eighteen
eighty four and eighteen eighty seven. That's pretty good for
a radical politician. It's entirely possible he'd have won a
seat in Parliament after another couple of years of base
building and preaching his cost to the masses. But he
never got that chance. Some of this may be due
to the fact that he was an impatient, cussed son

(16:37):
of a bitch, but mostly it was because he'd failed
to actually pay back any of the debts incurred by
his campaign, leaving his supporters holding the bag. By some accounts,
he was quite literally run out of town. So that's cool, okay,
So maybe a little bit of a scoundrel. Uh when
someone says the right things and then is secretly okay.

(16:59):
So he's just like he seemed like he was a
force of good, and then it turned out he was
maybe just a regular politician. He's still more complicated than that.
We've got a lot to go before he healed turns,
and it's, uh, I don't really know what to make
of this guy. This is one of the more confusing
figures I've dealt with. And there's a lot of aspects
of what he believed. Like he was, I'll say that's

(17:20):
from the beginning he was anti semitic, but also at
the start, it doesn't seem like he was more anti
Semitic than anybody else. Like everybody was shitty towards Jewish
people in fucking eighteen fifties New Zealand or wherever you
happen to be, um, because that was just that was
just life, you know, or eighteen eighties it was just
everyone was racist as hell. Um. So Desmond next moved

(17:44):
to a place with a very upbeat name of Poverty Bay,
which why would you name it that? It really seems
like a self fulfilling prophecy, like most people pick like
upbeating a Greenland. We call it like like like optimistic
or tajas which means friendship. And the New Zealand's like
everyone here is just gonna be fucking poor. Yeah, that's
what we're calling. Listen, we can aspire for more, but

(18:07):
why bother? Yeah, Poverty Bay. You know, to some extent
that's kind of comforting because you set the barlow. Nobody's
going to feel like they're a failure in Poverty Bay.
That's very true. So Desmond found work in a timber
mill and on a series of small farms. The money
was not good, the labor was backbreaking, and the strain

(18:28):
of working all day for someone else's profit clearly war
on his soul. Years later, Desmond would write about this
period quote many a time, when lying on my back
in a bushware or a tent after a day of
grinding toil, have I resolved that if I ever had
the chance to sweep away such a brutal system, it
would not be neglected. Okay, this sounds like a yeah.
This is like a first act of the movie kind

(18:50):
of declaration. Yeah. Now, during his time out in the
bush working at farms, he spent a lot of time
with Maori people, and at some point he met a
fellow named take Kutie. Now, Takuti was a Mayori warrior
and a former guerrilla leader. He'd basically been a terrorist
like this guy had been kind of like a New
Zealand equivalent of a dude like he would. He had
been viewed a lot, at least like a guy like

(19:11):
Bin Laden. I don't think he was that bad, but
he killed a lot of people. And then as an
older man, he reformed and he built a church and
he became more of like a peaceful activist um and
was very very popular. So this is a guy who
like and like in fairness, if you're a Mayori in
New Zealand at this point and you like decide to
murder a bunch of white people, you have some good
reason to do that. Yeah, I mean, actually really good

(19:34):
reasons in general pro terrorism. So wait, he was like,
I was going to make it terrible, but every time
someone was like and then they kind of liked him
at the end of his life. I'm like, oh, it's
like when people gave Sadam husseying like doritos. Yeah, I
mean he seems like he was a charming guy, said
I'm hus saying, we all he'd got his doritos. That's

(19:57):
all I know. He did get his doritos at take
Kutie was a better person than Saddam Hussein. But that
is a low bar. Wow, really coming in hot for
take Yeah. Now, Desmond had initially started hanging out with
take Kuti's followers as part of an effort to learn
some of their songs and rituals. It seems to have
been like an anthropological thing to him, like he was

(20:18):
just interested in Mayori culture. Uh, And so you know,
at some point, and like the the late eighteen eighties,
take Kutie decides that he's going to head back to Gisborne,
which is the town of his birth, and do like
like visit there with some of his followers. And this
is hugely controversial among the white people who live in
the area because obviously this guy had been a terrorist
for a long time and they formed an armed militia

(20:40):
and a lot of people are like if he comes here,
you know we're going to fuck him up. And Arthur
Desmond is the only white voter in the area, the
only white dude, because like obviously, like nobody else's fucking voting.
I don't think um, he's like the only voter in
the district with any sympathy for take Kutie or the
Mayori in general. And when the town held a meeting
about whether to whether to let take Kutie show up,
Desmond was the only person who spoke in his defense.

(21:03):
I'm gonna quote now from tak for, which is a
website about radical Australian politics. It's very sympathetic to Desmond. Quote.
Five hundred people packed into a school room at Makarata
and there was talk of bloodshed and massacres. They decided
to arm themselves and stopped take Kuti. Desmond spoke on
behalf of Take Kuti. He told the meeting that he
was acquainted with many of Takuti's followers and that take
Kuti meant them no harm. All he wished was to

(21:25):
visit the place of his birth. The meeting ended in
an uproar and he was thrown out. So at this point,
pretty cool, dude, standing up for a native guy. Yeah, yeah,
that sounds that he's he's using his privilege responsibly. And
you know how our listeners can use their privilege responsibly.
It comes. Yeah, this is an ad pivot. What you know,

(21:48):
no roll with it. I'm sorry to let me interrupt you. Well,
if you have privilege, why not spend it on the
fine products and services that support this program? Yeah you're right, Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
the best way to flexs are privileges to participate in capitalism.
I think that we can all agree on that. I
think every radical philosopher can agree with that very simple point. Yes,

(22:11):
Arthur Desmond certainly would listen. I pay three dollars for
a very salty bagel every day, and four dollars for
fucking uh twist top bottles of wine. There it was, well,
it was three fifty yesterday, Jesus Christ. Therefore, therefore I
must buy them. That's seventy cents per tiny bottle of wine.

(22:33):
You're basically spending money to not buy wine at those prices,
you really, and they and they are just juice. I
don't even think they're alcoholic beverages. It was just like
I drank four kool aid. Pouches and fell asleep, which
also sounds nice if you want to spend your money sensibly,
like Jamie did buy these products products, and we're back,

(22:59):
so uh when we're left off, Arthur Desmond has just
gotten kicked out of a first meeting where he's argued
on behalf of this. Uh this this former guerrilla leader,
current religious leader, Takutiel, He's still pretty pretty cool at
this point. Um. Now, the colonists mostly hated take Kuti
because you know, he'd been a violent and surgeant at

(23:19):
one point, and of course they were racist, but they
primarily were scared because they thought he was going to
disrupt the upcoming sale of a bunch of Maori land
to white people. Um, so they're they're big worry is that,
like he's gonna organize the local mayoris to stop this transaction.
So I'm gonna quote from tak for again. A few
days later, on the twenty first February, another large meeting

(23:40):
took place, this time in Gisborne. Eight hundred people attended
and passed a resolution to stop take Kutie by any
means necessary. Again, Desmond spoke in favor of tak Kutie's
visit He told the assembly that he had a message
from the Maori leaders at Takaraka and informed them that
they had no right to interfere in what was to
be a peaceful visit. Again, the settlers wouldn't listen and
a fight broke out. Desmond slightly outnumber it had to
be escorted from the meeting by the police. He was

(24:02):
described as the pakiha emmissary from the how House, which
is like the Pekia is like a word for white guy,
the how Houser or takutis you know, church in the
New Zealand Herald, and according to the paper, was luckily
to get out of the meeting alive. By this stage,
Poverty Bay was in a panic. The government stepped in
and arrested Takuti and his seventy followers, many of them
women and children, at Wayotahi. Takuti was charged with unlawful

(24:24):
assembly and dispatched to the Mount Eden Jail. So that's cool,
all right? Yeah, this is it's taking him a suspiciously
long time to become someone who's unsympathetic. That's part of
what's interesting about this guy to me is his journey.
I think I kind of get why he turned into
an asshole. UM. But that's the story we're building too.

(24:44):
So I think one of the problems when you have
a guy who ends up where where Arthur Desmond ends up,
which is basically a Nazi, UM, is it's easy to
like work backwards and and sort of attribute like the worst,
attributes that he wound up believing to like his prior actions.
So guys like Mark Derby, who is Desmond's biographer and

(25:04):
probably knows more about the guy than I do, suspects
that he mainly supported Take Cootie because he admired the
Maori leaders like violent past in his ruthlessness. UM. I
don't know how much I agree with that, And again
Derby has done more research than I have. But I
did read a lot of Desmond's writings on Take Cootie UM,
and I can't help but feel that there was more

(25:26):
going on than just his appreciation of the former insurgents,
like ability to do violence like that's certainly a part
of it. He does respect strength and like this guy's
the fact that like, unlike the working classes of his time,
this guy like stood up with a rifle and like
you know, acted out what he believed in. UM. But
I I, yeah, I think there was more going on here.

(25:48):
He wrote a poem about take Cootie, which was the
first of many poems from Arthur Desmond because he was actually,
in my opinion, a pretty good poet. And I'm going
to read an exerpt from that poem, the Song of
Takuchi Home. No, it's actually pretty good. It's kind of
like Kipling and style, but um, at least from an
early age, less racist. And then it gets way more

(26:08):
racist than Kipling, So yeah, cool. They tried to enslave us,
to trample us down, like the millions that served them
in field and town. But the sapling that's bended when
freed will rebound. Exalt for Ta Kuti Yoho. He plundered
their rum stores, He ate up their priests. He robbed
the rich squatters to furnish him feasts. What fair halfs

(26:29):
so fine is their clover fed beasts? Exalt for Ta
Kuti Yoho in the wild midnight, for a whose footsteps
trod lighter in the flash of the rifle, whose eyeballs
gleamed brighter. What man with our hero could clinch as
a fighter? Exalt for Ta Kuti Yoho? They say it
was murder, But what then is war? When they slatted
our kin in the flames of the paw Oh, darker
their deeds and more merciless by far exalt for Takuti yoho.

(26:53):
So he's like, he uses a lot of yoho there yo,
lot I did. This is the most yoho ng I
have ever done in this So you're like, that poem
is awesome. Yeah, you can see you can see you
can see his appreciation for the guy's violence, but you
can also see that it comes from like his recognition

(27:13):
that these people have been oppressed by colonial power. And
he's like, look, you can call this guy brutal, but
like the whole colonial system is a thousand times more
brutal than whatever violence this insurgent den't, And that's the
real crime. See what I was seeing was an A
A A B rhyming pattern, and the B is always yoho.
Hey hey, it's his first poem. Okay oh, that was

(27:37):
a fun fourth gradest sign I am. I am going
to read a lot more poems before this episode. There
are there are. This is the most poems we're going
to have in an episode. Does he ever go slam?
Did he ever go off? The rhyme scheme. I think
in a modern era, this guy would be a white
rapper and would probably take like a violent wing turn.

(28:00):
He'd be like one of those flat earth rappers who
like rants about like Talmudic Jews, like I'm going on
a tour across the flat earth. Yeah, look out for
your boy may fall off the edge. Yeah. Yeah, that
he would be that guy a thousand percent. Okay. So
after the end of his political career, Arthur Desmond moved

(28:21):
to Auckland. He got a job is what's called a
gum digger, which I did not look up because I
just want to imagine that as like literally a harvesting,
like chewing gum from the world. I know what's got
to do with trees. I understand what it really is,
but I'm going to pretend that it's he's digging up
like like bubble yum um. He became a He became
a member of the Timber Workers Union, which was a

(28:43):
fairly new thing at that point. Unions were just starting
to take off all over the world in the late
eighteen hundreds, and this was part of a global socialist trend.
Workers of the world uniting in order to strike and
bargain together for a larger share of the wealth they
created for their capitalist masters. Things started to look up
for Desmond. He was a point to represent the Timber
Union at the Auckland Trades Council, and finally he saw

(29:04):
his fellow laboring people realize how badly their bosses and
landlords were sucking them over. His firebrand instincts and poet's
heart made him an inspiring voice for labor. During a
maritime strike, he started publishing a newspaper, Tribune. It took
off among laborers and helped make Desmond a major leader
inside the strike. So he was just like, he's just
like marching around New Zealand being like, yoho, y'all, we

(29:25):
gotta there's probably a lot of your landhard's and asshole yoho. Look,
you couldn't get out of bed in the eighteen nineties
without a yoho or three. Like, let's be fair here. Yeah,
that's true, all right, So this is cool. Yeah yeah.
And one issue of Tribune he wrote, quote, how can
we expect just legislation and equal laws when those who
control private plundering concerns are legislators? Which is a fair,

(29:49):
fair question. Yeah. For the first time, in his life.
Things seem to be going very well for Arthur Desmond
thanks to the tribute, and he was finally making a
living as a writer, his dearest ambition, and he had
a prominent role stirring up the working class against the
capitalist pig dogs, his other dearest ambition. For a brief
shining moment, he tasted the sweet liquor of success, those
of us lucky enough to have drank it. No, it

(30:10):
tastes exactly like Shasta cola. Arthur Desmond's major target. What
that does? No, I was, I was just appreciating that
turn of phrase. Thank you. Arthur Desmond's major target during
this period was the Bank of New Zealand, which he
saw is the oppressive heart of the capitalist regime. And
it sort of was definitely was, absolutely it was. The

(30:31):
Bank of New Zealand was incredibly corrupt and existed primarily
to make the rich richer, something that has been true
of no other bank in history. On a regular basis.
Desmond excoriated them from his secret office hidden inside the
headquarters of the Auckland Employers Association. So he he sets
up an office in this big building and starts printing
like this, like far left Anti capitalist magazine without anyone

(30:52):
there like knowing it and without paying rent or anything
like that. And he gets away with it for about
three weeks and yeah, it's about all you could do.
That very stressful three weeks. Yeah, there's this weird, unshowered
guy printing off pages of newsletters. You should we do
something about. Someone comes up to him. He was like, hey,

(31:13):
you get out of here. And he's a giant, redheaded man,
like he's he's not he's hard to miss. Yeah, so
he's a giant like redheaded guy from New Zealand who
will eventually take on the rap name Ragnar red Beard.
If she told red Beard was a current like white
SoundCloud rapper, I wouldn't blink. I would I suspect there

(31:36):
are some. There's definitely like metal artists who use that
name and variations of it. There's like metal albums titled
Mit is right. He's inspired a lot of Nazi metal.
Good well, yes, so unfortunately, Yeah, after about three weeks,
the people who ran the association realized what was going on.
They told Desmond to clear his ship out and as revenge,

(31:59):
Arthur Desmond four just a confidential letter from a cabinet
minister to the association, basically accusing them of kicking him
out on the orders of a crooked politician. He used
this falsified information to accuse the association of conspiracy. Now
this did not sit well with the cabinet minister that
Desmond had implicated in a fake crime. He sued Desmond
for criminal libel, which Arthur Desmond was absolutely guilty of committing. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(32:23):
So he kind of oversteps here, uh, and things get worse.
I'm going to quote next from Tierra, an online New
Zealand focused encyclopedia. Quote. His opponents retaliated with accusations that
his article christ as a Social Reformer, first published in
the literary magazine Zeelandia in June eighteen ninety and reprinted
as a pamphlet with an introduction by George Gray, had
been plagiarized from an American magazine. Desmond claimed that the

(32:45):
American article had been stolen from his own and dismissed
the accusation as an electioneering dodge. His attackers included the
leaders of the single tax movement in Auckland, with whom
he had also fallen out. Desmond next appeared in Wellington,
where in early eighteen ninety one, he endeavored to interest
the Wellington Trades and Labor Council and supporting a new
labor paper. He lectured on the Wellington waterfront on Sunday afternoons.
A young man, irish, eloquent, poetic, hard up, red haired

(33:08):
and red bearded is how he was described. So he
gets he gets canceled for plagiarizing and he has to
move to Wellington. I like that. I like this whole
like old timey narrative of when you get canceled, you move,
You just go to another city, goes somewhere else. I
waited to get canceled there. Yeah, there was a time
in which going from l A to San Diego was

(33:28):
like landing on the fucking moon, right right? You just
have a new name. They're like, oh yeah, By the way,
I did look up Ragnar red Beard SoundCloud and there
is a result of an Austrian man. He hasn't uploaded
for six years, but he has nine He has nine followers,
and uh. Some of his songs are called love Isn't

(33:48):
Everything Tuesday Again, Destroy with Love Heart. None of this
sounds like our Ragnar red Beard. No, I mean, but
it does. But all of all of his album art,
his pictures of his abs, but not his head. I mean,
are are his abs fired? Jamie His Yeah, they're good,

(34:09):
they're good. He's wearing a leather jacket and then it's
just his abs. Yeah. Okay, so that's just a chord plug. Yeah,
listen to this defunct SoundCloud rapper, or at least look
at his sweet sweet as sweet washboard abs. Mm hmm, hey,

(34:31):
good for him. It's weird that we call them washboard
abs because I feel like the period of time in
which people figured out how to have really nice abs
was not the period of time in which anyone used
washboards to wash clothing. And I also don't think a
lot of people can call to mind the image of
a washboard very quickly. No, it's one of those things

(34:52):
I just learned recently that upper case and lower case
letters referred to like back when people use printing presses,
you kept all the capital letters in one case, like
a literal case in the lower case, like there was
an upper and a lower case in the box where
you kept the letters. This is not that. But history
is so stupid, it's really dumb. It's so dumb. Wow,

(35:13):
Well we've got yeah, we've got stuff like that, Like
there's the fucking icon of a floppy disk in the
top left hand corner of a word document or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
so I guess washboard abs is like that anyways. Yeah,
Arthur Desmond probably had washboard ads at this point because
he rarely got enough money to eat properly, because he

(35:34):
was a poor intermittent fasting, which is what happens when
you get canceled for plagiarism and wind up working on
the docks. You fast a lot and get really sexy.
Oh I'm sure he was hot as fun at this point.
So Desmond did not stay in Wellington long. Rather than
battle the lawsuits over defamation in plagiarism, Arthur took the

(35:56):
root of all great conman and fled his home country
for a less lawbound end. In his case, it was Australia.
And in Desmond's defense, all Australians are criminals, so it's
a solid place to run after being caught committing numerous crimes. Wow,
he went there, he did, he did, and I will
go there. I I am firm about Australians being criminals.
Don't let him behind you. If you keep your wallet

(36:17):
in your back pocket. Now, Desmond landed in Sydney and
immediately got back to the thing he did best, rabble rousing.
Arthur befriended the leading men in Australia's labor movement, including
two guys who would go on to become Australian Prime ministers.
He started writing articles and poems again, and by eighteen
eighty nine was known as the poet of Revolution. In
my opinion, he was pretty good. I'm gonna read one

(36:39):
piece he published in Reynolds's newspaper. I think he gets
better at this point, so we'll see how you think, Jamie.
I kind of like some of them, like yoho, bitch,
it's good, Okay. So here's a poem he wrote. Yeah,
I don't need I don't need your ship. So I'm
gonna read a poem. I'm gonna read a goddamn poem.

(37:00):
A poem express. Some slay with sword, and some slay
with sword, and some with words. Some have no battle plan,
some stab with venom subtle word. Each does the best
he can, and each man gets what he can win
great wealth, great love, or fame. The conqueror gets his
just reward, the conquered gets his shame. And weak ones,

(37:22):
where a crown of thorns or bleat in living hell,
the strong man crowns himself with gold and all the
world as well, and each man gains what others lose,
no use to reason why, each plants his heel on
fallen foes by love or law or lie. Attle kind
of dark. It's really good. It's interesting. You can see

(37:43):
where you can see. He's his his ideology has started
to move on from like, uh, this sort of like
habitual um support of the working class and like anti
elite to like this um the strong get what they
can take and that's sort of normal. Like he started
the like he's he's gotten jaded at this point. Um,

(38:03):
so he's in his like moody poetry period. Yeah, yeah,
he's he's, he's he's gotten. He's he's turning emo a
little bit. The yoho's are gone. He's on the wave
now and okay, okay, he does change up as rhyme scheme.
He does. Yeah, he he took poetry too, and he's like, oh,
there's that. He's taken poetry three in a minute. Here,

(38:26):
it's uncool to rhyme yoho with yoho. Hey, hey, this
podcast is pro rhyming Yoho with Yoho, that's fair. Now.
Desmond starts another newspaper at this point, named Hard Cash.
Uh Taford describes it as a journal of finance and
politics published in Sydney. Desmond was clever as an accountant,

(38:47):
and his articles on how money rules the world were
well watched by businessmen. Now Desmond's like Hard Cash was
filled with like tips about which banks were going to
go up and like where you should pull your money
out of, which companies we're gonna take down earns, and
he developed a reputation of being incredibly accurate. So he
starts making a lot of money off of this because
both like working class people will buy it to know

(39:08):
like how to protect their money or what banks to
pull it out of, but also like the capitalist class
starts buying it because he's just he's always he's pretty
much always right about these things. And the police wind
up on his tail because they're like, number one, how
the fund does this guy know all this stuff? And
number two he's like causing runs on banks by telling
people to pull their money out of banks and stuff. Um.

(39:28):
And he's also kind of making himself very comfortable by
selling this this journal so he's gone from like, uh,
labor organizer fighting for the rights of the indigenous people
to like advising people and how to make a killing
in the stock market essentially, Like that would be the
modern um comparison, but he's he seems to be doing
it with an eye towards fucking up the economy. Um.

(39:51):
So he's he's still kind of an anti capitalist guy,
but he's also profiting heavily off of his anti capitalism, Right,
that's kind of how I translate at it. Yeah, okay, okay,
so we're not I'm not I'm not totally lost yet. Okay,
not totally lost yet, but you're also trouble on the horizon.
Trouble on the horizon. He's getting more more cynical and

(40:13):
uh kind of um profiteering off of his off of
his activism. Yeah, which, you know, you could look at it.
He always was sort of doing that. Um. It's a
little hard to tell because we don't have huge amounts
of information about his earlier life. It honestly sounds like
he just wants to be a poet, but as like, oh,
I guess I have to do this other stuff to

(40:33):
you know, like keep my poetry career moving. Yeah, yeah,
he's he's gotta he's he's got to start, uh the
Wall Street Journal in order to get his poems published.
Um yeah, that's that's kind of what's going on here now.
As an illegal magazine, Hard Cash was printed on a
secret printing press hidden inside a cave at a place
called West's Bush in Paddington. Because Australia is a ridiculous place. Uh,

(40:58):
the Australian Justice Department tried to shut it down. They
weren't able to track down Arthur Desmond because at this
point he was pretty good at avoiding the law. However,
they succeeded in arresting several other organizers who wrote for
Hard Cash, and these people like stuck with Desmond. They
wouldn't give him up to the police. But Desmond kind
of abandons them immediately. Um like he's like he's just

(41:19):
he's just fucking in the wind. So his conspirators get
six months sentences and get charged with libelling the Prime Minister,
and Desmond flees from the law and keeps writing revolutionary articles. Um.
In the early eighteen nineties he joined up with the
Active Service Brigade, which was and by some accounts, he
actually created the Active Service Brigade, and this is an

(41:41):
anarchist political action group. Um. Now, I've read two different
sort of descriptions of what this was. The pro radical
politics description is that like conservative politicians were infiltrating labor
groups and left wing groups with like hidden um you know,
paid informants since off and the Active Service Brigade would

(42:02):
go in there and like beat the ship out of
those people and protect labor, organizing meetings to enshare free speech.
And the other description of what happened is that he
started a group of people who would beat the funk
out of anyone they disagreed with who tried to run
for political office, and like break up conservative political rallies.
I have no idea which is the actual case. Um,

(42:24):
probably a lot of both, to be honest. Yeah, it
doesn't sound like either. Like scenario is entirely likely a
little bit of a he said, she has said nature
to that. Yeah, I'm gonna guess the conservatives are like
fucking around and trying to infiltrate left wing political groups,
and the Active Service Brigade ferrets those guys out. And
I'm also going to guess they beat the ship out
of a lot of people who just disagree with them

(42:45):
because Arthur Desmond's kind of a dick, um, kind of
I mean, he only becomes a famous Nazi. Yeah, he
does become a famous Nazi. I can't say which version
of events is true, but probably both, right, That's usually
the case. Let's situations like this, um now on paper.
The ideals of the Active Service Brigade were high. They

(43:06):
claimed to stand for free speech and attempted to quote
change the present competitive system into a cooperative social system.
There's lofty goals. Stood in contrast the deep economic depression
that was then sweeping through Australia. Banks were collapsing and
part due to the work that Arthur Desmond had carried
out as the editor of Hard Cash and Yeah. Desmond
finally was arrested, you know, in the early eighteen nineties,

(43:28):
not for running in a legal newsletter, but for writing
going bunk and chock on the wall of a bank, um,
which seems to have been like part of a Yeah.
He was like writing that a bank was about to
run out of money. Basically, so he's trying to create
a run on the bank by by putting this s
graffiti up. Um, and he gets busted for that, but
he got busted for a banks crime. Yeah he did,

(43:48):
he did. I mean, like it's definitely more radical than
banks that he was actually trying to destroy a bank
by doing this, Like this is the eighteen nineties. Everything
was easier. No, that's hardcore. I mean, I'm back. Yeah,
Like if it is an easier error when you could
like funk a bank up by writing it's out of
money on the side and chopping the people just learned

(44:10):
to read, they won't believe it. Oh wow, Okay, so
he did. He did a little bit graffiti. He did
a little bit of graffiti. Nice. Yeah. Now, the government
obviously hated Desmond's anarchist group, as all governments hate all
anarchists doing anything. Desmond was repeatedly accused of sundry dynamite plots.
And it's anyone's advice as to whether or not he

(44:30):
actually tried to blow anything up with dynamite, to be honest, probably, Yeah,
I mean he sounds like that guy that he does,
sound like that guy dynamite plan and and there was
a lot of anner all over the world at this point,
late eighteen nineties, early nineteen hundreds. There's a lot of
anarchists blowing a lot of things up with a lot
of dynamite. Like when dynamite first gets made, they didn't

(44:51):
think that, like there's this interesting period in history when
like they know how to make really effective explosives that
anyone can use, but there are still aren't laws against anything.
So it's like dynamite gets made and you're like, well,
I guess we should just sell list to everybody and
at least to some problems. I'm just a little yeah, jeez, Okay,

(45:12):
you know, he's a I believe that he's a dynamite guy.
There's a really good chance he's a dynamite guy for sure. Yeah. Sure,
I have no trouble believing that. Now. Throughout all this,
Desmond continued to fight to convince the laboring class to
rebel against their capitalist masters. In eighteen ninety three, he
wrote another poem titled Labor Song for the hilariously named

(45:35):
Wago Worker, which I assume makes more sense if you
understand Australia worker. Okay, the Wago work. It's cute, right,
It's it's like a baby. It's like a it's like
a baby trying to say maga. Yeah, this is definitely
the opposite of maga though, well that's well, Robert turned
the m upside down. What do you have exactly? Wait,

(45:59):
we're going to read another calm. Oh you bet your asked.
We're going to read another poem Daniel Office. So this
was published along with a short one sentence editorial that
just said, if you vote for the government, you vote
for your own coffin political So now here, I'm going
to read labor song above the Senate's brawl, the maddening
roar for gain? Do you hear the Christmas Carol? The

(46:21):
felons clanking chains beyond yon prison walls your leg iron
comrade slaves, While here in marble walls are Harlot's nights
and knaves, your comrades rotten jail. The hungry cry for bread.
Your wives are thin and pale. Their hearts are filled
with dread, and earth resounds with praise and holy heavenly tones,
while tigers prowl the land to crush your children's bones. Home,

(46:41):
men of New South Wales hark here the fetters clink?
Are you but eunuch cherils that only scream and slink?
If you were virile men, you'd raise your strong right
arm beard tigers in their din to guard your mates
from harm. You live the life of dogs. You tug
and scat and strain. You backed the slaver flogs while
raking in his gain. You see your sisters starved. You
see them on the marts. You hear the tigers snarl

(47:03):
while rending out their hearts. Omen of New South Wales,
Behold your ruffian horde, who spurn you with their hoof
and bash you with the sword. Behold the butcher band
that sheer and tan your hide? Have you not grit
to stand and tame their wolfish pride? You rise to
voice your wrongs. They club you for your pains. We
allowed their murderous guns to scatter, splash your brains. They
steal your public lands, They steal the cash you earn. Hoh,

(47:26):
cringe to their commands. You're only dogs, not men. And
glattering halls they feast Harlet's knights and knaves while inside
prison walls your leg ironed comrade slaves, Homemen of New
South Wales hark here the fetters clink? Are ye but
eunuch slaves that only scream and slink? I liked that one.
That was a better poem, right he's got bad I was.

(47:46):
I was trying to but know that one slabs that's
a good one. That's a good poem, and you can
see where he's He's like, he's still a labor guy.
He's still on the side of like the working man.
But he's like Pisto's like, why won't people fucking rebel,
Like this ship has been sucked up for so long
it just keeps dilus. He's just like you you fucking
Unix if you were labors. Yeah, yeah, he just you

(48:09):
had some fucking He's definitely like a misogynist at this point,
but it's what do you want, right, Okay, So everyone's
a misogynist and that's normal and good and we love
that it's not normal like in fairness, like people like
Emma Goldman, like there's a lot of anarchists who are
actually like kind of radical about gender equality at this point,

(48:29):
but Arthur Desmond is not one of them. I genuinely, uh,
I liked that one. Yeah, it was a good poet.
I liked the part where I was like, I don't know,
I don't know, and they said crush a child's bones
and I was like, all right, I like it. Yeah, yeah,
it's you can. You can. There's something like that's kind

(48:50):
of understandable there if you like, like most of us,
I think, have like looked out at the world recently
been like, why the funk are we letting this ship happen?
Like that's that that's an understandable impulse to be like
frustrated by that after so many years. Yeah, no, I
like it. Yeah, you know what I like? What? Tell me?
Tell me I know what products and services you know

(49:13):
what won't crush your children's bones advertiser or depending on
what you're in the market for, Yeah, they might crush
your bones, might crush your bones. You got to be careful.
Dick the Dick pills will give you a bone to crush. Well, there,
that could just be a service too, crushing your child's bones.
I wish we advertised for dominatrix is, but not the

(49:34):
ones that crushed children's bones, just adult bones. I was
thinking recently, I wish that a taxidermist would sign on
with our show. I think, Oh, wouldn't that be cool?
It would be really nice if there was like a
punk rock uh taxidermists that was willing to Yeah, put
in Beachdel cast In and off your taxidermy cocker spaniel.

(49:55):
I'm interested in like the ads you'd read for that,
do you have too many animal this in your freezer? That? Honestly,
I wanted to get my hamster taxidermied, and then I
forgot that she was in my freezer, and then I
just kind of flung her out the window. Solid, really solid.
I dug a small hole, but I didn't put in
the effort I was planning. Yeah, we all dig a

(50:18):
lot of small holes in our lives, which is why
we all need the products and services that support this show.
Gorgeous pivot. Thank you products, We're back. Yes. So by
this point in time, Arthur Desmond has written his first

(50:38):
poem that appeals to Jamie loftus. So I'm glad we
finally got there. S you finally stand Arthur Desmond um. So,
As you can see by that poem, he was pretty
well on his way to being very disenchanted with left
wing politics. You can hear the frustration and rage at
the broader masses of the working class and their failure

(50:58):
to rise up in revolution. The labor government in Australia's
mild reforms had taken much of the wind out of
the left sales, and after eighteen ninety three, Desmond's writings
grew more defamatory towards elected leaders and markedly more anti semitic.
His authoritarian tendencies also grew more and more pronounced. And
it's here that we're going to get into some real
fun left wing political theory discussion. Do you love political theory,

(51:20):
Jamie love it? Yeah? Now, Desmond was definitely like in
the anarchists sort of strain of thought by this point
in time. But obviously that body of political theory is
is pretty wide. There's a lot of different types of anarchists,
and the particular variety Desmond seemed to be most sympathetic
to is called egoism. Now, the simple, partly accurate summary

(51:43):
of egoism is the idea that self interests should be
the foundation of morality, and in like the more positive
way to translate that is that like systems that force
people to act against their own self interests, like capitalism
forcing a laborer to work in a deadly mind in
order to make ends meet, like, that's fundamentally unethic goal
because it forces people to act against their self interest.

(52:03):
Better name for it than egoism, it needs work. You've
got some notes on this fringe political theory. Now, lefty
politics is a complex galaxy of frustratingly different belief systems,
most of which sound like nonsense to anyone who hasn't
read a bunch of books by dead men. My definition
of egoism isn't even super accurate to the egoism practiced

(52:26):
by most egoists today, because there's roughly as many different
branches of that theory as there are egoists, which is
to say about fifty the egoist Twitter. Yeah, there're sure
is uh the Yeah? They they fucking love. There's this
guy Max S. Turner who's like probably the most well
known egoist philosopher people on there's a big chunk of
people on Twitter who fucking love his ship. Um, which

(52:48):
I don't understand and will not attempt to analyze. But
he was a big influence on Arthur Desmond. Starner wrote
a book called The Ego and his Own Uh and
I yeah, again, I don't really understand Sterner's writings. They
seem kind of like, uh, I don't know, like nonsense
to me, um, But I did find a summary of
it by a group of hardcore libertarians with the American

(53:09):
Institute for Economic Research. Max S. Turner's individualist anarchism is
a way to overcome the horrors of the modern state.
He envisions a union of rational egoists in a society
that does not need a ruler. The community of rational
egoists is a universal commercial society. In fact, the more
a society is based on voluntary exchange, the less right
it is and thus less effective the force. Individualist anarchism

(53:30):
carries its purpose in itself and does not serve a
higher end. The rational egoist will respect the rights of
others because he respects himself. He will not be violent
because he does not want to be attacked. This attitude
of the individual anarchist stands in sharp contrast to the
destructive role of the collectivist entities. Individual egoism is the
answer to the egoism of the collectives. Sterner wrote, my
cause is neither the divine nor the human. It is

(53:51):
not the true, the good, the right, the free, etcetera.
But only mine. And it is not universal, but it
is unique like me, as I am only I. Nothing
goes beyond me and myself. I know right, I don't
like him, No, I don't like him either. Him. He
doesn't seem like he would be I don't agree with him,
and I don't think he'd be fun to be around. Well.
And it's the way that Sterner writes is kind of

(54:12):
so broad that there's there's like a right wing and
a left wing interpretation of the same book that come
to really different conclusions, because there's a lot of Sternerist
egoists who are not at all the pro capitalism interpretation
and who take a totally different message from it. Again,
I've tried to read the book, and I just decided
to go read about the Syrian Civil War war because

(54:32):
that's more uplifting. Um. It's just it's it's it's frustrating
to me. I don't like political theory. UM. I kind
of doubt that Desmond subscribed to the libertarian interpretation of
Sterner's ideas because of his hatred of capitalism. Um. And
also he was not at all an advocate of non violence,
and in fact, in the early eighteen nineties he increasingly
became an advocate for extreme violence. He started to write

(54:54):
lovingly of man as the fighting, roving, pillaging, lusting, cannibalistic
animal par excellence. So he definitely is takes a lot
of these egoist ideas and that he is not the
pacifist kind. He's not the oh if I don't hurt anyone,
they won't hurt me. He's the killing, rape and conan,
the barbarian kind of fucking egoists. So that's that's, that's
where this guy starts turning as his frustration against the

(55:17):
failure of the labor movement to rise up like bills right. Yeah.
During his last months in Australia, Arthur Desmond started to
publish a twenty five page tracked The Survival of the Fittest,
which outlines some of his new ideas. In it, he
wrote about man's desire to destroy as the thing that
makes him the absolute monarch of the world. Now. Desmond

(55:37):
was not the progressive sort of lefty either. He viewed
women as frail beings at the best of times, and
wrote for the welfare of the breeds and the security
of descent, they must be held through subjection. He promised
disaster would follow if quote every these lovable creatures should
break loose from mastership and become the rulers or equals
of man. Was he single for most of his life. Yeah,

(55:59):
he did mayor me a girl that was like twenty
something years younger than him when he was an old man,
and then she left very quickly after that, and she
died in a sanitarium. He does sound absolutely unlovable, I
will say that. Yeah, he sounds hard to get along with.
You get that feeling from the guy. Yeah, Okay, so
he's single and he doesn't like it. He's single and

(56:20):
he does not There's actually a lot of in cell
stuff like she's frail and I actually don't even care,
but I'm just because it needs to be said. One
of the things that's interesting about Mike is right, which
we're going to cover the book and a lot of
the tail in part two. He kind of predicted thirty
percent of the internet, um, and not the good you

(56:41):
know what. Impressive but not good. He's he's ahead of
his time, but not in a positive sense of that phrase,
like he's ahead. He's ahead of his time in the
same way that like the guy is in the eighteen nineties,
who imagined, like the mass bombing campaigns that would be
the few Trivi warfare were ahead of their time, like

(57:02):
they were right, but not in a good way. But
also it's like and also, I mean, good for you
for predicting something terrible that people were powerless. Yeah, so
Desmond had other influences besides Sterner. And again I don't
want to like, I don't want to like lead people
with the impression that Max Sterner would have necessarily supported
Desmond's conclusions about like women and all of this stuff

(57:24):
like this is just like yeah, yeah, I'm not I
don't know enough about Sterner to say that, but that
is what Desmond takes out of the writing. Yeah, Desmond
Dozmen's opinions on women seem more like a hymn thing. Yeah,
that was going on way before he started identifying as
an egoist too. He was always yeah, there's a lot
of you know, male poets who feel that way. No

(57:46):
misogynist male poets. You would be shocked. Not I'm not
even think of anyone. Oh I am thinking of someone. Okay,
never mind, go ahead, I'm gonna keep standing my wokeking
Reird Kipling, who h I think it is fair to
describe as the least racist man in history. There you go. Yeah,
let's not let's not fact check that at all. Yeah,

(58:06):
let's not fact check that in any way, shape or
form now Desmond had. Desmond had other influences besides Sterner.
Charles Darwin's writings on natural selection impressed upon him an
almost religious belief in the importance of survival of the fittest,
which is never a good set of thoughts to head
too far down. He also devoured Nietzsche, particularly the anti

(58:27):
Semitic bits of Nietzche's theory. All this, combined with his
increasingly rapid disdain for the placid working class, turned Desmond
from a labor organizer into a man who believed, quote,
it is natural for men of power to rule feeble men.
And yeah. In eighteen ninety four, the police finally got
close enough to catching Arthur that he was forced to
flee to Britain. We don't know precisely what he did

(58:50):
during this period. There are stories that he traveled to
Manchuria and South Africa, getting up to god knows what.
By the time he landed in North America in eighteen
nine five, he had made the full transition from union
man to leftist revolutionary to nihilistic egoist. He settled in
Chicago and almost immediately published a book, The Survival of
the Fittest in eighteen nine. We actually have one of

(59:11):
the newspaper ads for this home and boy is it something.
So this is actually for a later version of the
book when he changed the title to might is Right.
But it's still a good note to end on. So
I'm gonna read I want, I want Sophie to show
you that ad, and I'm going to read it out
so it says in big capital letters, might is Right,
the only book of its kind ever printed. If you
don't like this book, don't keep it, send it back

(59:32):
at once, and I will refund your money and pay
postage both ways. Might is Right or Survival of the
Fittest by Ragnar Redbeard. This is an historical and scientific
revindication of the grand old Anglo Saxon war philosophy they
can take who have the power, and they can keep
who can and rugged boldness of style and volcanic energy
of thought. This epic marking volume is without doubt the

(59:53):
most remarkable pronouncement that has appeared in Christendom for fifteen centuries.
Ragnar red Beard, taking up the threat of Darwin is
Him where Spencer and Fear and Trembling laid it down,
points out that The higher type of organism is the warrior,
and that battle is the process ordained by nature for
de fighting the born subordinates and cowards from born nobles
and proprietors. Then war for life and land and love

(01:00:14):
for women, power and gold, this earth and all its
treasures vast is booty for the bold, Booty for the ballot,
for the bold, the ball Okay, and there's a picture
of the cowboy. Yeah, the car of the cowboy on
his horse, Like this is just a throbbing penis of
an advertisement. It was like, hey, this is just he

(01:00:37):
could have just published a picture of his dick in
the paper and it would have worked out. The same
boy for the Bold. In the opening of the ad,
he also gets defensive for no reason. He's like, yeah, rules,
if you don't like it, you can return it. Like, bitch,
I don't know if I'll like it. He's like, no,

(01:00:58):
It's like he's in is a bedding rejection. How could
you not like it? Look at the fucking cowboy and
he and I would be fucking remiss if I didn't
include a little bit of a poem. Yeah, And you
can see the cowboy drawing clearly has a big beard, yeah,
I think I think that's him as a cowboy. Yeah. God,

(01:01:18):
so you love it, You love it, Jamie. You're gonna
be You're gonna be so frustrated. Next episode. We're gonna
read a lot from Mida's right next episode, and you
are going to be beside yourself. This is like the
This is like the fucking founding father of in cells
and like the fucking worst parts of the Alt Right. Like,

(01:01:41):
how could I not read this to you, Jamie, It's true,
it's it does upset me the most. Yeah, well he
had a good run there for a little while. But
now he had a good run there for a little while,
and then he became the patron saint of men who
have a pile of cum socks beside their bed next
to their rifle. Just like yeah, just like a gun

(01:02:02):
next to a petrified sock. Just one doesn't flop if
you pick it up. The sock is the best case scenario,
the worst case scenarios. It's one of those anime pillows.
Oh no, Yeah, if he'd been born in modern times,
Desmond would have definitely fucked a pillow with a Japanese
Wayfoo girl on it. He would have Yeah, he would

(01:02:23):
have gotten one of the pillows with the holes in it.
He would have had one. Yeah. Well, Arthur Desmond confirmed
for pillow fucking. Yeah, And I'm not saying pillow fucking
is a bad thing. I'm just saying he fits the bill.
He fits the bill. Now, Jamie, in our next episode,
we're going to go into detail about what exactly Arthur
laid out in his manifesto, how it was received, and

(01:02:46):
how it continues to influence people today. But that's all
going to come on Thursday. For now, Jamie loftus, it's
time for you to deliver your manifesto in the form
of plugging Yo, plug dobles, okay, plugables. I wanted to
plug right now Red Beard's SoundCloud of horrors everyone. I
haven't listened to it yet, but I look forward to
hearing your thoughts. Please hit my mentions. I will forget

(01:03:09):
that I said this, and I will be confused. I'm
on Twitter at Jamie Lofts Help, and you can listen
to me on the Bechtel Cast every Thursday at oh
wait and every Thursday period. Yeah, yeah, that's that's And
if you're in New Yorker, l A. I'm doing my
my one person show that is basically Elizabeth Holmes in October,

(01:03:32):
so you can you can come. Elizabeth Holmes would have
really appreciated the wisdom and Mida's right. She she seems
about just delusional enough to be into it. Oh, brother,
cannot find me on SoundCloud, although once I get canceled,
I do plan to start a second career as that
would be a great place for you to retreat to. Yeah,

(01:03:56):
you can find me on Twitter when I get unbanned.
Uh yeah, what we will, well, Jamie, I posted a
link to an article that I wrote about a terrorist attack. Uh,
they hate that. Twitter banned made for that. Yeah, yeah,
they hate it when you hate when you report that's bad. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's it's fun. Um. But you can find

(01:04:19):
me presumably by the time this air is hopefully on
Twitter at I right, okay. You can find this podcast
on Twitter at behind the bat or at bastards pot
Jesus Christ. You can find us on the internet at
behind the Bastards dot com along with the sources for
this article. Uh, you can buy t shirts, you can
buy cups, can buy branded branded tasers, tear gas, grenades,

(01:04:39):
whips and chains. Everything you need to make my right
in your life off of t public dot com. Just
slip up behind the bastards, terrifying, terrifying. Well what else, Robert,
what is there? Something else? So? Yeah, don't you have
another podcast with Katy Still and Crittie Johnston? Uh those

(01:04:59):
names aren't familiar to me? What's happening? Who? Maybe does
a one pump, one cream mean anything to you? Sir?
Now that that now you're speaking my language. I also
have a podcast Cody Johnson and Katie Stole about the
election called Worst Year Ever. Because it will be the
worst year ever. So you can get started this year

(01:05:19):
with some some useful information to help arm you with
knowledge for next year. Uh. So that you don't have
to arm yourself with sticks and spears. Uh um, so
that the end of the episode, next episode, we'll have
more poems. Oh good, yo ho yo ho,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Ragnar Redbeard: The Patron Saint of Toxic Masculinity